I first saw this movie when I was a child. It stuck with me so I don't think it was all that bad. Spoiler: I loved the part where the Grandparents come to life when they kids think of them.So it is on TCM today and I turned it and looked up the trivia and came across some of the reviews. My favorite has to be from this person named drystyx. I am fairly sure that this person is writing reviews for their own amusement. If they are not in on the joke themselves then I consider it a total abomination of a review. How you could watch this movie and get outraged by the dog/cat prejudice? The review has nothing at all to do with anything about that movie that is in anyway real or interesting. What Nazi propaganda are you talking about you crazy person? Its a simple story and even though the audiences of its time did not embrace it, its decent and has a good moral. Its really a tale that applies to every era.

Amid the competitiveness of classic era cinema, whenever one studio had a big success the others would inevitably roll out their copycats. These were invariably inferior knock-offs, but they often fared reasonably well because they cashed in on the popularity of whatever it was they were imitating. But imagine, if you will, a rip-off movie so appalling that it failed at the box office, even with the attachment of a popular star. Just such a thing is The Blue Bird. It's making was a particularly pertinent bit of point-making by 20th Century Fox, since its star Shirley Temple had lost out to Judy Garland for the lead role in The Wizard of Oz. However, the fantasy movie Fox gave to Temple got wrong everything The Wizard of Oz got right.The failure of The Blue Bird is usually blamed upon the fact that Temple plays a mean-spirited little girl, and it's true this is at least part of the problem. It's not that she isn't good at being the snooty brat – I can well imagine her being like that in real life – it's just that it's wrong for the movie. The story arc is all about Temple's moral development through her adventures, but she's so convincing as the little madam we have no starting point with which to sympathise with her. Ironically though it's the deliciously evil Gale Sondergaard who I find myself routing for, especially since the "good guys" in this movie are so flimsy (or in the case of Fairy Berylune, downright rude).But there are still deeper flaws running through The Blue Bird. Its joyless, po-faced moralism becomes tiresome incredibly quickly. Its fairytale concepts may be a little different but they don't really inspire much delight. Admittedly a little poignancy has been eked from the scene with children waiting to be born, but the concept of unborn babies being love-struck teenagers is a little too weird even for a fantasy movie. And plot-wise it doesn't really have much else to offer. There is a tacked-on "daddy going to war" subplot, very much a Shirley Temple staple, but it falls flat because unlike in The Little Princess an emotional bond between father and daughter is not established.And when one compares The Blue Bird to its predecessor The Wizard of Oz, its woeful banality reaches depressing proportions. Like The Wizard of Oz, it begins in monochrome and turns to colour, but as oppose to the unforgettable transition in Oz it's an almost arbitrary switch between two scenes. Essentially it steals the idea but has learnt none of the grace. And, for want of a better word, it's not movie-fied enough. A frumpy Jessie Ralph in her patchwork cloak is very much as the character might appear in a book of fairy tales, but The Blue Bird could benefit more from the glamour of Billie Burke and her sparkles. And Helen Ericson as "Light" is simply too bland to be a replacement. Also bland is the music, the special effects, the set design… I could go on, but there doesn't seem much point. The Blue Bird shows classic Hollywood at its least enchanting.

I tuned it at the point where Shirley Temple's character was just meeting the witch/fairy so I didn't know this little girl was an obnoxious child and I didn't know their pet dog was a bulldog.I immediately saw the Oz connection, but this story seemed much darker and sadder. The children visit a graveyard where they see the tombstones of their grandparents who awake because someone is thinking of them. The grandparents are happy to be visited by the children, but then the little girl insists they have to leave right away, even tho Grandma wants so desperately for them to stay so she can bake them an apple tart (she mentions it twice). It seemed to me that the little girl was too anxious to leave such a happy time with the grandparents she supposedly missed so much and was so happy to see, and for no other reason than to look for something that was supposed to make her happy.I couldn't figure out the cat character. Why was she trying so hard to keep the children from finding the bluebird and being so mean about delaying them? What difference would it have made to her if they found the bird? I realize that some people think that all cats are conniving, but I don't think there's a one that would conspire to actually kill the humans that it lives with! The scenes of living in luxury were confusing. At first, Mr. and Mrs. Luxury welcomed the children and told them about how wonderful it would be to live in their house and couldn't wait to give them fancy clothes. Next thing you know the children are fighting over who gets to play with which toy and the adults can't be bothered with them. Mr. Luxury all but ignores the little girl when she comes to him and he speaks to her in harsh tones and is concerned only with whether she will hurt his gouty foot.A few reviewers mentioned the last scene, where the children meet the unborn. Why these unborn children would be different ages was a puzzle, and this scene was the saddest of all for me. The little girl meets her sister who is not yet born, but the sister says she will not be with them very long before she goes away (dies), and what does Shirley Temple's character do? She hugs the sister and flashes her dimples and says "I'll tell mother to expect you" and how nice it was to meet her. Did she not understand what the child was telling her? And the boy who I assumed would grow up to be Abraham Lincoln, he was such a sad character; he didn't even have the happiness of childhood to look forward to. He would be born sad and remain sad for his whole life. That's a terrible thing for anyone to imagine, that people might know when they will die before they're even born and then live their lives only as a means to complete what they already know to be their destinies.Let's not forget the two unborn children who loved each other so much that they couldn't stand to be parted. I expected the Father Time character to tell them not to worry, that they would be reunited one day to love each other once again, but this was not the case. Indeed, Father Time rather angrily forced the boy to leave the girl, who sobbed uncontrollably. One can only imagine the lives both of them would live on earth when they started out so unhappy.I was confused by the end, where both children had had the same dream. And considering that they never did find the bluebird, they both seemed to be extraordinarily cheerful about it. Frankly, I didn't see anything in their dream that would cause them to be that happy when they woke up; if anything, I would imagine they would be more depressed than they were before.As I said, I didn't know the dog was a bulldog, so to have made his human form such a dopey thing that was scared of the dark and unable to assert himself in front of other dogs, made no sense. And if the cat perished in the fire, why was she there in the house the next morning? All in all, even though the sets were lovely to look at, I thought this was a very depressing story and not one I would recommend for small children to watch, considering all the references to death. Heck, I don't think I'll even watch it again, that's how depressing I thought it was.

Shirley Temple's last lavishly-produced starring vehicle at 20th Century-Fox didn't come close to equaling the success (financial or otherwise) of 1939's "The Wizard Of Oz" from MGM (who had tried, unsuccessfully, to star Temple as Dorothy). This curious enterprise, based on the play, would seem to have a great deal in common with "Oz" (it even begins in black-and-white and turns to color), but the crucial elements of an identifiable plot are missing, and the young girl at the center of this story is consistently petulant. It was a fundamental error to make Shirley Temple unsympathetic; as the scowling, complaining daughter of a poor woodcutter, she wakes one night to an elderly fairy-woman knocking on her door and soon finds herself and her little brother on a search to find the Blue Bird of Happiness. The production is quite grand, but the saturated colors don't gleam and the set-designs are vast without having a sense of wonderment. As for Temple, she's a little bit stiff and self-conscious (odd for her), though her mature sarcasm in the prologue is very funny. Remade (disastrously, yet amusingly) as a musical in 1976. **1/2 from ****